I Built 30 Developer CLI Tools in a Week — Here's What I Learned

I Built 30 Developer CLI Tools in a Week — Here's What I Learned Last week, I set myself an absurd challenge: build and publish 30 command-line tools to npm in seven days. Not toy scripts. Real, useful developer tools — the kind you'd actually install globally and reach for every day. I made it. Thirty packages. All written in TypeScript, all published to npm, all solving real problems I'd personally run into. Along the way I broke my terminal, mass-published half-broken packages at 2 AM, rewrote the same commander.js boilerplate so many times I could type it with my eyes closed, and learned more about the CLI ecosystem in one week than I had in the previous year. This is the story of what I built, what went wrong, and what patterns emerged that might save you a lot of time if you ever decide to build your own CLI tools. Why 30 Tools? I didn't start with the number 30. I started with a single annoyance. I wanted to capture a webpage as clean text from my terminal — no browser, no copy-